Here is a short video of a project I had to do in an Earth Science class I am taking (I am going for my second master's degree in Elementary Science Education and will hopefully be done next spring). The project required that teachers put together a "Wonder Box" of Earth science items and design a lesson plan around the box.
This reminded me of a project I had done with fourth graders during my student teaching in Social Studies. I had students work in groups and they had to design a museum box that held "artifacts" of specific Native American tribes.
I put together a short 1 minute 30 second video that highlights how I made my "Wonder Box" (or museum box) and how it can be done in a Social Studies class and how the activity can be incorporated into a notebook assignment.
This could also be used in science. Student's can create a biome box and have artifacts of what might be found in that biome and why. Student's can create an animal box and highlight adaptions that help them survive.
It is a bit like a glorified diorama but I like the "museum" element to it and anytime students have to create something they are more likely to remember the content (Bloom's upper level activity!).
I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.
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